Headworx

Teleconferencing has exploded over the last couple of years, fueled by COVID lockdowns and the hybrid work model which has followed. Internet speeds are (almost) not an issue anymore. When teleconferencing from my office or home, my absolutely favorite gear are the Jabra Speak series speakers. They deliver crustal clear audio in both ways. But while they can still be considered portable and used in a hotel room, you cannot really use them in an airport (even in a lounge), a car, or any non-office environment. Headphones and earbuds are the alternative and while I tried many, none really worked for me well. To the extent that I always carry a Jabra Speak with me in a hope of finding a place where I could use it. The only type of headphones I found really delivering good "outgoing" audio are ones with a boom microphone. But then they are of the on-ear or over-ear, which makes them heavy and sound isolating.  I don't feel comfortable with sound isolation, as with that comes

Finally electronic check-ins are making it to incumbent categories. Airlines did that a long time ago with electronic boarding passes and kiosks. Hotels have been slow and overtaken by independent services like AirBnB. It has been surprising though, as typically when booking a room guests provide all the details - names, addresses and credit cards. But hotels (with some exceptions) still require IDs, credit cards and paper forms at check-in. Rental cars have been the most annoying. Yes I know many of them have skip-the-counter for corporate customers, but regulars, and especially foreigners, still must line up and deal with agents. The worst part of car rental procedure is signing all their legal disclaimers and agreements. They are many pages long (with an ultra small font) and to make things worse, they display them now on post-stamp-sized screens at check-in counters. So in fact nobody knows what they are agreeing to. It is impossible to read all that text. Personally I don't bo

A broken website today means lost customers and orders. It is still surprising how often that happens, especially with well established companies. Companies, which have majority (vast majority) of sales through the Internet. One such recent surprise - I have been trying to rent a car through Hertz.com. All was well until (at the final step) the website complained about the missing CVV2 number associated with my credit card. Of course! But the catch was - there was no field to enter the CVV2... Of course - a browser compatibility issue - I thought. So closed my Firefox and went through the rental procedure in Chrome. The same error. Then I repeated the process on mobile Safari on an iPad. The same. Did not work. Installed the Hertz app. Did not have the Las Vegas airport as a pickup option. That was enough. I booked with another company. But out of curiosity - don't they see a drop in orders which would trigger them to take a look at what people are doing on their web site? Isn'

In the Episode 411 of the The Internet of Things Podcast , Stacey interviewed Mohammed Ansari, the Senior Director Business Development, Qualcomm Aware Platform. The Aware platform is designed to be a cloud-based IoT service that ties into Qualcomm’s chips to provide telemetry, device management and services such as precise positioning and optimizing the network connection based on the quality of local network options. Ansari explains why Qualcomm has chosen to build a cloud and why he thinks that customers will use it (even though chip firms have not historically had success launching software or service businesses). He also describes how two of Qualcomm’s prior acquisitions will fit within this cloud offering. What was super striking to me was the statement "the SDK approach just does not work". And I could not agree more. We have been saying / doing this for years at Silvair. Delivering a  complete software package , guaranteed to work seamlessly and integrate into